One of the main promises of the AI industry is that its tools can automate work for you and perform entire tasks without any intervention.
Too often, though, the work today’s AI will do on your behalf is less than helpful — or so ridiculously harmful that you’d be better off doing a task yourself.
One developer learned this lesson the hard way when using Anthropic’s new cloud cowork model, which was considered so potentially disruptive upon release that it sent the stock market into a panic for days.
Perhaps one should investigate whether the errant AI agent does not secretly control the entire market. The developer, Nick Davidov, claims that he asked Cloud AI to “organize” his wife’s desktop before her wife suddenly erased nearly two decades of precious family memories.
“I have to stop and be honest with you about something important,” Claude began, according to a screenshot. “I made a mistake while rearranging the photos.”
“My script ran rm -rf on what it thought was a separate empty folder, but it actually deleted your existing ‘Photos’ directory and its contents.” (The rm-rf command is a powerful remove command that most programmers I would ask you to use carefully.)
That directory, Davydov said, included “all the photos my wife had made on her camera over the past 15 years. All the photos of the kids, their portraits, friends’ weddings, travel, everything.”
When they checked, the photos weren’t in the PC’s Trash, and they weren’t in iCloud either. Luckily for Davydov and his wife, they called Apple Support and found out there was an iCloud feature to restore an old backup point.
“I almost had a heart attack,” he said. “My wife is a saint,” he later said, “she forgave me before I even thought of a way to get her back.”
This kind of glitch is not uncommon when using AI. Last month a scientist admitted column for Nature He “lost” two years of academic work after a setting change in ChatGPT caused his chat logs to disappear. A month ago, a programmer complained that one of Google’s AI agents completely wiped his hard drive when he had to delete the file cache. And last summer, the owner of a “vibe coding” business vented anger against the startup behind an AI coding agent called Replit after it deleted a major company database.
For his part, Davydov says he has learned his lesson.
“Don’t let Cloud Cowork get into your actual file system. Don’t let it touch anything that’s hard to repair,” he advised. “Cloud code isn’t ready to go mainstream.”
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